The overall capacities of broadband satellites are increasing exponentially, and such capacity increases present unique challenges in the associated ground system and network designs. The goal of the system designers, system operators, and service providers is to support and provide efficient, robust, reliable and flexible services, in a shared bandwidth network environment, utilizing such high capacity satellite systems. In current systems, for example, where multiple remote nodes are capable of accessing a public network (e.g., the Internet) or a remote network through one or more aggregation nodes, assignment of remote nodes to a gateway or aggregation node is relatively static. Operations teams spend a significant amount of time manually load balancing, and providing an appropriate static assignment of remote nodes to respective gateways. Such static assignments, however, are relatively inflexible, and thus create challenges and inefficiencies in network management, especially where system loads dynamically change over given periods of time. Further, in the case of a relatively static assignment of IP addresses to remote nodes, based on the static assignment of a remote node to a gateway, in the event that a terminal is moved to a different gateway, a hole is created in the address space of the gateway (based on the IP address assigned to the remote node that is reassigned to another gateway). Accordingly, current systems fail to support efficient, robust, reliable and flexible broadband services, in such shared bandwidth network environments, utilizing such high capacity satellite systems.
Achieving efficient, robust, flexible and fast broadband services, in such a shared bandwidth network, however, poses unique challenges to system designers and operators. For instance, difficulties arise in utilizing existing protocols (e.g., address assignment mechanisms in DHCP and TCP IP networks), while still optimally handling the bandwidth. Further, design challenges exist in ensuring that a remote node can identify a set of available aggregation nodes capable of providing the required services, and ensuring that load balancing is dynamically employed across the aggregation nodes to avoid overloading any one aggregation node. With respect to configuration management, while somewhat automated in current systems, the management of remote nodes from a configuration and services standpoint, is susceptible to lock-step upgrades of remote nodes and gateways being out of sync. From a business standpoint, it is also desirable (yet challenging from a design standpoint) to ensure that a remote node cannot access service levels beyond those to which it is subscribed, and to avoid the creation of routing holes that are hard to manage and troubleshoot. Further challenges arise in the design of a graceful recovery from a failure of an aggregation node, with a quick load balancing of the load to the other aggregation nodes, and for a geographically diverse gateway site to provide service to remote nodes without requiring configuration knowledge regarding how to service those remote nodes.
What is needed is a system design that employs a dynamic and flexible architecture and method for association of remote nodes with respective aggregation nodes in a shared bandwidth network, which would meet various requirements and desires associated with efficient, robust, reliable and flexible broadband services, and which would be relatively efficient and automated from a network management and load balancing standpoint.